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Fruit of their labor

Posted: Saturday, March 17, 2007

CRAWFORD - That's more than just an apple orchard a group of student and community volunteers have been planting on an Oglethorpe County farm this month.

Each tree they put in the ground is an heirloom variety of apple that will bear apples once common in north Georgia back yards and small farm orchards, but now increasingly rare. Almost all the apples Americans eat nowadays are the handful of varieties we can buy in supermarkets.

The trees aren't much more than 200 sticks poking out of a red clay field, the eroded legacy of Southern cotton farming now owned by University of Georgia anthropology professor Robert Rhoades, who lives in a log cabin on the property.

But in a few years, they'll begin to bear fruit with names like Arkansas Black, Fallawater, Crow Egg, Dixie Red Delight and Shockley, named for a Jackson County fruit expert who exhibited them in the Georgia State Fair in 1852.

And when they bear fruit, one more part of Rhoades' vision for the 320-acre farm will be in place. Little by little over the past 15 years, he has been transforming the farm he's named Agrarian Connections into a kind of living history of Georgia agriculture and agrarian life.

Like some other parts of the farm, the apple trees themselves are partly a living bank of genetic material. But that's not the main reason why legacy orchards like this one are important, said Lee Calhoun, an apple historian whose North Carolina orchard holds nearly 500 varieties.

"I'm not convinced that my orchard or (Rhoades') orchard are doing important work as far as saving irreplaceable genetic material," Calhoun said. "What I do think we're doing is saving an important part of our Southern heritage. What we're saving is the old apples that people grew and ate for hundreds of years."

The South has lost more than 1,000 apple varieties already, Calhoun said - and when the apple varieties go, so do the stories behind them.

"We'd like to do more than apples in the long term, but apples were so central to life in the past," Rhoades said.

Any family farm would have apple trees in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and families used their fruits for apple butter, eating raw, cooking, making apple cider - even feeding to the pigs.

"The epitome of the Southern fruit tree was the apple tree," Rhoades said.

A more visible part of Agrarian Connections right now is its growing collection of log cabins.

Rhoades bought an 1825 log cabin soon after he got the property, and since then he's added nearly a dozen more cabins, dismantling each one to bring it back to the farm to repair and reconstruct.

Last year, Rhoades brought in another kind of heirloom creature, four Pineywoods or Cracker cattle descended from Spanish cattle left behind in Southeastern states centuries ago.

Like those heirloom apples, the Pineywoods cattle were common in Georgia and valued for their hardiness, heat tolerance and heritage, but now are considered an endangered breed.

Archaeological exploration has shown that at least three farming cultures occupied this land. Native Americans grew food here 4,000 or more years ago. More recently, the land was farmed by early pioneers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, then by "yeoman farmers" in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century.

Eventually a "trail of time" will link re-creations of the three farming cultures.

Cattle, apples and log cabins aren't the only preservation going on here.

April 28 will mark the 10th annual "seed swap" on the farm, part of a project called the Southern Seed Legacy that Rhoades began several years ago with his wife, Virginia Nazarea.

Like the apples and the cattle, the aim of both the seed legacy project and the annual seed swap is to preserve heirloom varieties of vegetables and crops that are in danger of being lost. Each year, people come from across the Southeast to exchange seeds for garden vegetables with names like cowhorn okra, washday peas, Snow on the Mountain butterbeans and red calico beans.

Oglethorpe County leaders hope Rhoades' farm one day will draw streams of visitors, helping boost an "agritourism" economy in the county, but the farm's not yet ready to go on public display, Rhoades said.

"I'd like to see that day, but in the meantime we're just going ahead with these interesting projects," he said.